Safer sexting is now a Snap

November 30, 2012|Eric Zorn | Change of Subject

Teenagers use cell phones. (OLIVIER MORIN/A)

Just so we're clear, I stand foursquare against the practice of minors electronically transmitting photographs of their private parts. No exceptions. Not to one another. Not to strangers. Not by text. Not by Twitter.

Adults should probably refrain as well — the pitfalls are obvious, the payoffs minimal — but since they're old enough to make such decisions for themselves, I'll keep my censorious thoughts to myself.

Yet I find myself ambivalent about the surging popularity of a smartphone app seemingly designed to enable the exchange of such pictures — a form of what's commonly called sexting.

The app up for discussion is called Snapchat, and it allows the sender to set the time interval — the longest is 10 seconds — that a photo will appear on the recipient's phone before it self-destructs.

Forbes reported this week that users are now transmitting more than 10 million images a day via Snapchat. In Apple's latest download charts, it's the fourth most popular free iPhone app, ahead of Instagram and Facebook, and last month's release of Snapchat for Android phones will only increase its presence on the scene.

The appeal is obvious. The cellphone pix you send out, be they unwholesome or simply unflattering or frivolous, exist only in the moment. They can't be forwarded, Facebooked and otherwise preserved in ways that can haunt you any time from tomorrow until the day you die (perhaps of embarrassment).

Think, for example, how different things would have been for then-New York congressman Anthony Weiner if the risque photo he mistakenly tweeted in May of 2011 had discreetly dissolved rather than detonated his career? Alas, Snapchat, the brainchild of two young Stanford alums, wasn't available until September of that year.

In interviews they have denied that the app's primary purpose or use is sexting. And we can take them at their word while still asking whether it doesn't encourage the practice by giving users a sense of security.

How common is sexting? A survey to be released Friday by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project shows 21 percent of smartphone users say they've received sexually suggestive images on their devices (though only 9 percent report having sent such images).

Something in our primate DNA evidently urges some humans to initiate such displays. So as a parent, I wonder if it's time to develop a new variation on "the talk."

Your mother and I strongly discourage it, of course, but, honey, if you do send around pictures of your junk, we very much hope you'll protect yourself with Snapchat.

The analogy to contraception is apt. Snapchat, like some popular forms of birth control, isn't guaranteed to work 100 percent. As critics have pointed out, recipients of Snapchat photos can, if they act quickly enough, activate screen-capture apps or even use a conventional camera to preserve the images that are supposed to vanish without a trace.

The program notifies users when their photos have been screen-captured, but that can't be much comfort.

Is it too much of a mixed message to encourage kids to use Snapchat while discouraging them from sexting of any sort?

My teens don't yet have smartphones, yet I intend to keep repeating my daddy mantra — assume whatever you post or send will go viral — and add to it reminders of the illustrative vulnerabilities of Snapchat.

Even photos that seem to vanish in a puff aren't necessarily gone for good. When it comes to sexting, there's only one totally effective method of reputation control: abstinence.